There was no need to take the bet, as a couple of the rangers had already left to check on the chopper’s status. Taking a seat on a decorative boulder noticeably scarred by the storm, Suttles glanced down as the remaining bits of his cellular phone trickled away into the dirt, leaving only a slab of plastic and a few dangling capacitors clipped to his belt. Not surprisingly, there wasn’t a single intact piece of communications equipment to be found among the dazed and befuddled company.
“He’s gone.” Robinett nodded toward the far end of the parking area, where the wooden barriers had been pushed aside to allow a large vehicle room enough to pass. “And we’re stuck without any means of calling for help.”
“Let’s get out on the interstate,” Kerry suggested. “We’ll flag down someone with a car phone, or a trucker with a CB.”
Suttles trailed behind his two colleagues. “I’m afraid it won’t be that simple. If I were out driving in the middle of the night, I might stop for someone in a uniform. Even a trucker might not pull over for a bunch of beat-up, gesticulating maniacs dressed in rags. I wouldn’t stop.”
“We’ll find somebody. People are curious.” She glanced down at her muchly revealed self. “If necessary I’ll go stand in the middle of the slow lane. That ought to make a trucker or two blink.”
Don’t overestimate your attractions, Suttles murmured but only to himself.
On one point they agreed: sooner or later someone would pull over to find out what had happened. He peered back over his shoulder, in the direction of distant Tucson. The question was, how long until that happy moment arrived? How far would their long tall Texan have traveled by then? They didn’t even know what direction he might be heading. Unless he was a complete fool he’d get off the interstate fast, whence he could continue in any conceivable direction. He might even now be heading for the international border at high speed. If he made it into Mexico before they could cut him off, they’d have a hell of a time getting him back. Sealing the border must be their first priority. Keep him in the country and they’d run him to ground sooner or later.
Robinett was staring skyward, his voice full of wonder. “How do you order up a meteor storm, keep it confined to an absurdly small area, and moderate the impacts? Thousands, we must have taken thousands of hits. Surely they couldn’t all have been individually guided?”
“The suit.” They both looked back at Suttles. “The alien may be dead, but his suit is still active. It contains mechanisms we don’t understand. A logical function of such a piece of equipment would be to preserve and defend its owner.”
“So you bomb your perceived enemies with micrometeroites.” Kerry snorted in disbelief.
Robinett rubbed his injured arm. “Some of them weren’t so micro. I took a couple of hundred hits myself, yet I’m still walking around.” He nodded off to their right. “Meanwhile the big brothers of the pinheads that were pelting me were punching holes in army trucks. I can’t even conceive of that kind of precision.”
“All the more reason why we have to get ahold of that suit and its commute.” A thoroughly frustrated Kerry kicked an uprooted cactus aside.
“Yes.” Robinett turned thoughtful. “I wonder what other tricks it has in its repertoire? Maybe next time it won’t be so careful.”
“We’ll take precautions.” Skin gleaming through her torn clothing, Kerry topped a low rise and started down toward the interstate.
“Against micro-manipulated meteor storms?” Robinett sounded something less than confident. “We’re going to have a hell of a time bringing this guy in.”
“We’ll get him.” Saud slid beneath her shoes. “If nothing else, he has to sleep sometime.”
“That’s so,” agreed Robinett, “but dead aliens probably don’t.”
“Then you’re convinced that’s what it is?” Suttles asked him.
“I wasn’t before. I am now. Al least, I’m convinced that it’s an alien. I’m not so convinced that it’s dead.”
“I told you; it’s the suit that’s doing everything.”
“You’re sure? You’re absolutely positive it’s dead? I won’t be convinced until the autopsy’s been run.”
Remembering the Texan’s concern for the bodily integrity of his discovery, Suttles feli guilty. “I saw it up close. It’s dead.”
“Right. And form follows function. There’s dead and then there’s dead. Read your Egyptology.”
Behind them officers were beginning to give orders to their demoralized troops. Equipment salvage commenced in the hopes of finding something capable of communicating with headquarters. The effort proved futile.
Almost as futile as the captains’ attempts to flag down passing traffic. Vehicle after vehicle ignored their frantic gesturing. A few slowed slightly but then sped up again, their occupants no doubt discussing and probably having a laugh at the expense of the trio gesticulating by the side of the road. The operator of one eighteen-wheeler slowed long enough to favor Kerry with an appreciative whistle, but didn’t stop.
Recognizing that this might take a while, Suttles found himself a comfortable patch of sand and sat down. Eventually they would be missed and others would come to check on the operator’s status. That could take some time.
With every car that shot indifferently past, with every truck that rattled the road without slowing, their quarry was receding farther and farther into the cool, clear Arizona night.
NINE
On the crumpled map, Tucson loomed tantalizingly near, but the longer he thought about it the less sure Ross Ed was of his ability to avoid the attentions of the military there, much less the local police.
The Fleetwood was the problem. Instead of a generic world car he was cruising the highways and byways of the Southwest in a veritable boat, a land yacht in a sea of canoes. He was too easy to spot.
It was all very unfair. He was no criminal. He’d set out from home to see the Pacific, and by God, he was damn well going to see the Pacific! Army or no army.
Though he wondered how harshly his would-be captors had suffered from the violent storm, he wasn’t about to go back and check on them. He might not be so lucky a second time. He did hope no one had been seriously injured. It was evident that their capabilities had been crippled because the lights in his rearview remained distant. Until they recovered he would continue to put miles and speculation between them.
Having cornered him once on the interstate, it was reasonable to suppose that they might try to do so again. Certainly the Caddy would be easy to spot from the air. Therefore it would behoove him to get off and make his way on less traveled byways.
He considered Mexico. It was close, and possibly safe. But the roads south were few and easily reconnoitered. Besides, if he thought of it, it was likely that the military would, too. Still, it was a tempting thought. If only he knew how much time he had before pursuit resumed, or if they had managed to contact additional help by now. The sooner he made a decision, he knew, the better his chances of retaining his freedom.
He thought back to the confrontation. The officer who’d done most of the talking had seemed to mean well, but while friendly enough, he’d been plenty insistent. They wanted Jed, and they wanted him. There’d been no mistake about that. Sure, Ross was an upstanding, proud, patriotic citizen, but that could and frequently did mean different things to different people.
At the moment the democratic principle that seemed to be most in question was the matter of personal property rights. Though it was hard to think of Jed as property, he’d found the body, and until a court stated otherwise, the body was his. Not the army not anyone else was going to take his dead buddy away from him without his consent.
Probably the best way of ensuring his rights would be to hightail it into the nearest real city and wake up a newspaper editor or two. Surely the discovery of a real, genuine, honest-to-Mars alien body ought to rank right up there as news with the president’s personal peccadilloes and the outbreak of the latest fighting in Bosnia. Of course, it wouldn’t outrate the O.J, trial, but Ross Ed was nothing if not a realist.
He frowned. While tempting, he decided to hold on to the idea and keep it as a last resort. He didn’t much like the idea of playing Kato Kaelin to a dead body. Essentially a private person, the notion of having his face splashed all over the tabloids was one that held very little appeal.
No, what he wanted more than anything else was to be left alone to sort out his options in his own good time. That meant no deals and no publicity. After all, what if despite everything he’d seen and all that he’d been through, Jed still turned out to be the product of an elaborate hoax, some eccentric billionaire’s idea of a joke not only on Ross Ed but on the military and the rest of the government? He’d wind up looking like a champion idiot. Better, as his daddy always said, to take things slowly. Do that, and you’re less likely to step in a mess of rattlers, or something even more unpleasant.
The sign swelled in his sight until he could read the numerals “191.” A quick check of the map revealed that it ran south to the border and north into the mountains. It seemed as good an exit as any. Besides, he was getting hungry, and it was hard to think on an empty stomach.
